Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 114

reintroduction would be screened and quarantined. If wolves retain
their fear of humans (which I will discuss in a moment), attacks are
likely to be extremely rare, perhaps non-existent. The chance of being
killed by a wolf in Europe, even where they are abundant, is much
smaller than the chance of being struck by lightning, or of being slain
by the wrong kind of bedroom slippers (the cause of a number of fatal
plunges down stairs) or by a collapsing deckchair. Even so, their
reintroduction is a risk, however small, that will be imposed on other
people. So it should happen only with wide public consent.
We expect the people of other countries to conserve far more dan-
gerous animals than wolves: lions, tigers, leopards, elephants, hippos,
crocodiles and Cape buffalo, for example. Many people in rich nations
give money to the wildlife groups protecting them. Are dangerous (or
in this case not very dangerous) wild animals something we choose to
impose on other people, but not upon ourselves?
Wolves do present a more realistic threat to livestock, especially
sheep. For reasons which are not well understood, they prefer to hunt
wild game, though sheep are easier to catch. 53 Even so, wherever they
live they clash with livestock farmers. The impacts across the whole
industry are small (less than 0.1 per cent of the sheep kept in the parts
of America where wolves live are killed by them, 54 and 0.35 per cent
in Italy 55 ), but their effects on an individual farmer can be greater,
especially if a local wolf has developed a taste for mutton. Occasion-
ally a wolf will slaughter a large number of sheep in a single attack
(wolves will return to their kill for weeks if there is enough meat:
mass killing is an attempt to create a larder).
Across France, Greece, Italy, Austria, Spain and Portugal, an aver-
age of €2 million a year is paid out in compensation to farmers who
have lost animals in wolf attacks, and roughly the same amount is
spent on preventing them. 56 Though these figures are small, the agen-
cies handing out the compensation money could be overpaying, as
dog attacks are often blamed on wolves (in Italy, for example, there
are 900,000 feral or free-ranging dogs and just 400 or 500 wolves 57 )
and some claims are probably fraudulent.
including humans. Some of the goldminers in Roraima told me of terrifying outbreaks
caused by vampires in areas they had prospected in the western Amazon.)